Recognizing Critical Behavior amidst Minijets at the Large Hadron Collider

The transition from quarks to hadrons in a heavy-ion collision at high energy is usually studied in two different contexts that involve very different transverse scales: local and non-local. Models that are concerned with the $p_T$ spectra and azimuthal anisotropy belong to the former, i.e., hadronization at a local point in $(\eta,\phi)$ space, such as the recombination model. The non-local problem has to do with quark-hadron phase transition where collective behavior through near-neighbor interaction can generate patterns of varying sizes in the $(\eta,\phi)$ space. The two types of problems are put together in this paper both as brief reviews separately and to discuss how they are related to each other. In particular, we ask how minijets produced at LHC can affect the investigation of multiplicity fluctuations as signals of critical behavior. It is suggested that the existing data from LHC have sufficient multiplicities in small $p_T$ intervals to make feasible the observation of distinctive features of clustering of soft particles, as well as voids, that characterize the critical behavior at phase transition from quarks to hadrons, without any ambiguity posed by the clustering of jet particles.